Column: PACE Awards a celebration the industry's culture of innovation

"Something different that has impact" is how Eric Varton defined innovation to me in an interview for Automotive News' "Daily Drive" podcast.

He's Yazaki North America's vice president of engineering. Last week, he picked up two PACE Awards on behalf of his teams. Once he got them, he said, he handed them to the innovators whose ideas inspired the winning products. You can see them celebrating on the front page of this week's issue.

It's not the first time a company has won multiple PACE Awards — Federal-Mogul Powertrain did it as recently as 2019. But it's an amazing achievement, in light of the many outstanding improvements in automotive engineering over the past year — or any year.

Last week, I went to my second PACE Awards ceremony. It was my first time as an emcee, and my enthusiasm for what it represents remains strong. The awards are a celebration of the work that makes the auto industry better each and every year, building upon previous achievements to make automobiles safer, cleaner, more affordable or more enjoyable.

Yazaki won awards for more flexible, less cumbersome EV wires and a narrow-focus lens technology for high-bandwidth data optical transmission.

If you are an engineer, you already know what all that means (or are complaining that some nuance has been criminally trampled upon), while everyone else is nodding along like, "Yeah, that sounds important."

And at the risk of losing nuance, let me say: Yes, these are important because we all demand that our cars transmit more data from end to end, whether we think about it or not. And for anyone trying to make an electric vehicle, being able to blast a big-ton of electrons through a wire that will unwind after a long trip and still fit snugly in a vehicle design — yeah, that's valuable.

Here's the thing: I'm just a journalist — a guy with a finance degree, a career in the news business and a profound skepticism toward any claims of profound progress that I don't fully understand. My baseline position is "prove it."

The problem is that until it's on the market for consumers to judge and owners to test, I don't really know what's a breakthrough and what isn't.

The beauty of the PACE Awards is that I don't have any pressure to claim to know more than I do: I have smart people to tell me who has important technology.

As I said on the stage of the Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Music Center in Detroit, the judges' "industry knowledge, experience and integrity [is what] gives the PACE Awards program its rigor and credibility."

Not to be trite, but it isn't just the winners that have done amazing things. As the Oscars cliche goes: It's an honor just to be nominated.

In our case: It's an honor just to be a finalist.

Case in point: CabinAir, which developed a compact electrostatic filtration system that is about as effective as Tesla's super-powered "bioweapon defense mode" but with a smaller size and fewer end-of-life complications.

Founder and CEO Daniel Hagstrom declined to name customers beyond Volvo, but he could say that the company has contracts with 11 of the world's 14 biggest automakers. However you slice it, this supplier's innovation offers a quick catch-up-or-better option for incumbent automakers — and startups, too.

Of course, it's been a rough time for suppliers, even as automakers and dealers rake in record profits: The low output that makes each individual vehicle more valuable crushes most suppliers' business models. The only thing worse are the sometimes weekly changes to production schedules. Inflation in raw materials and labor rolls up through the value chain, while shipping by truck, train, air or sea all get more expensive.

"It's been a challenging time for all suppliers in our industry," Varton said.

There's always push and pull, and the higher prices that suppliers are now charging customers have led to at least a temporary profit warning at Ford.

Other automakers are surely seeing similar rising costs.

With value chains fragile and demand far outstripping supply, parts makers have some pricing power for now and maybe another year or so. The ones that can maintain higher prices are those with proven innovations: something different that truly makes a difference.

Seeing that steady flow of impactful innovations — that's worth celebrating.